Amplifying the Twilight

Curatorial Statement
Brian Andrews & Marc LeBlanc


Human history has etched an expanding curve from myth to science. Its path crosses territories that were once sacred but came to be viewed as either knowledge or superstition. As culture and technology advanced, so did the boundary between what was rationally determined and cosmologically intuited. The evolution of culture and science resides at this fringe, expanding outward, in the twilight where human knowledge begins to break apart into the unknown.


In 1973, writer Arthur C. Clarke declared in his Third Law of Prediction, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The law collapses the differences between a scientist and a magician to milestones on the path leading to modern humanity.


Amplifying the Twilight investigates this dialectic of the romantic and the rational as it is visualized in contemporary art. The exhibition explores what kind of experimental thought and feeling are possible at the boundary of rationalism and "magic", drawing from esoteric and self-made spiritual practices, scientific research stations, and icons from popular science fiction.


David Coyle's video triptych Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, reinterprets the speculations of science fiction as a form of personal horror. Coyle dresses up as the Tin Man, a magician, and a hominid monster, all historical archetypes of technology and its implications. The self-portraits chant “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”, the infamous quote from Clarke’s 2001, when a computer gains consciousness and murders its human creator. Shashana Chittle and Alison Ruttan’s artistic practices methodically investigate the diffuse boundary of science from opposite sides. Alison Ruttan was artist-in-residence at the Bonobo Research Station at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Her digital print Bred in the Bone humorously documents the parallels of human and primate behavior. Shashana Chittle’s meticulous drawings archive her experience awakening each morning, capturing her fleeting visual perceptions as an amateur scientist recording mythical forms at the edges of her perception. Sayre Gomez and Ryan Fenchel employ the art historical trope of abstraction to illuminate ambiguous structures of the universe, from the microcosm of Fenchel’s OIO, to the expansive macrocosm of Gomez’s Formal Exercise Make and Do.


Amplifying the Twilight can be viewed as a reconciliation between the idealism of romanticism with the realism of modernity; a brief image of the moving edge between what we can think and what is beyond our perceptions.

Brian Andrews & Marc LeBlanc